13 janeiro 2017

#O1/2017 - The Essays of Virginia Woolf in O sol e o peixe

My first reading of the year was a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf in a book called O sol e o peixe. As I was researching, I found out that all the essays that were inside of this book were from different sources. So at the end of this post, I will share where you can find all of them if you are not from Brazil and you want to know where you can read them, so we can maybe discuss them.

I will open my heart and say that I was a little bit disappointed with this book. I'm not disencouraging you to read it or anything, I was just expecting something more. However, I will try to put in words why I didn't like it as much.

The first piece of writing of the book is called Montaigne, and it is a review of the book Essays and this first text kept me going, because the way she talked about her reading was so envolving. The reasons why she loved it, the reasons why she admired him, the reasons why she thought that this book deserved some space on everybody's schedule was simple honest, moving and delighting. I remember that by the end of it, I immediately open my Wish List at Amazon and added the book on it. That was the perfect beginning for it and I thought that all the texts would move me as much, however, that didn't happen.

As I continued, I started to feel disconnected with the reading, I knew it was well written, but I was not interested enough on the reading. Of course, I read everything, but there was a an essay called The love of reading, that it reminded me of a book that I read recently called Sobre a leitura by Marcel Proust, and both texts were about reading and loving this activity. But it sounded that Virginia was talking to someone who is from a literary world, maybe someone from the critics, but Proust was talking to me, to my best friend, to my best friend's friend, and everybody that I knew that loved reading. It was more personal, and Virginia's text sounded sometimes so tecnical, like she was trying to explain her love of reading, while Proust was showing it to us.

It sounds terrible to compare two completely different artists, but it was what I felt and I'm trying to be open and honest about it. Maybe this is just a matter of preference, maybe you will like her essays more than anything, maybe you will say that I am completely crazy, but let's try to respect everybody's opinios and feelings about this reading.

Of course, I will continue reading things written by Virginia Woolf, because she is just so lovely and brutal at the same time. But for this year, I think I had enough of it.

If you wanna discuss all the texts with me, you can find them on:

The sun in the fish - Time and Tide

Pictures - Nation & Athenaeum

The cinema - Arts

Street Hauting: A London Adventure - Yale Review

Evening over Sussex on a Motor Car - The death of the Moth and other essays.